President Trump said his administraton has provided governors with lists detailing information on laboratories and additional coronavirus testing sites after some “didn’t understand” their state’s capacity.
“Vice President Pence spoke with governors from all 50 states about our unified effort to defeat the virus. He had a great call,” the president said during a Monday press conference. “Prior to the call, we provided each governor with a list of the names, addresses, and phone numbers of the labs where they can find additional testing capacity within their states.”
Trump said he would publicly release the details of the list to the press, adding that “hundreds and hundreds of labs are ready, willing, and able,” but said that some governors, including Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, weren’t aware.
“Some of the governors, like, as an example, the governor from Maryland didn’t really understand the list. He didn’t understand too much about what was going on, so now I think he will be able to do that. It’s pretty simple,” Trump said. “We hope to be able to help him out. We’ll work with him, and we’ll work with all of the governors.”
Hogan said Sunday that the No. 1 problem during the coronavirus pandemic has been a lack of testing.
“And I’ve repeatedly made this argument to the leaders in Washington on behalf of the rest of the governors in America,” he explained.
“The administration, I think, is trying to ramp up testing. They are doing some things with respect to private labs, but to try to push this off to say that the governors have plenty of testing, and they should just get to work on testing, somehow we aren’t doing our job is just absolutely false,” the governor added.
Trump on Monday compared the testing to the early need for ventilators and said states “need to assess their complete inventory of available capacity, some states have far more capacity than they actually understand … Some of the governors didn’t understand it.”
The president also brought up Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker and said the Democratic governor “did not understand his capacity.”
“Not simply ask the federal government to provide unlimited support, I mean, you have to take the support where you have it, but we are there to stand with the governors and to help the governors, and that’s what we’re doing,” Trump said. “And they have a tremendous capacity that we’ve already built up.”
There have been more than 782,000 coronavirus cases in the United States and at least 41,800 deaths, according to Johns Hopkins University.
